The two-year fight to stop Amazon from selling face recognition to the police

Facebook just released a database of 100,000 deepfakes to teach AI how to spot them 

Sponsored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise The Download Your daily dose of what’s up in emerging technology 06.15.20 Good morning! Today: inside the two-year battle to stop Amazon selling facial recognition to the police, and how Facebook is training AI to spot deepfakes. Get your friends to sign up here to get The Download every day. The two-year fight to stop Amazon from selling face recognition to the police   What happened: IBM has stopped working on facial recognition technology, while Microsoft and Amazon promised a one-year moratorium on selling their systems to police departments. They say it’s to give politicians time to pass new laws to regulate the technology. Not out of the blue: Researchers and civil rights advocates have been calling for facial recognition technology to be banned or heavily restricted for years, often followed by pushback from the companies involved (most notably Amazon.) They’re cautiously optimistic about the announcements, but they also recognize that the battle isn’t over. Credit where it’s due: In February 2018, MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, then a Microsoft researcher, published a groundbreaking study called on the gender and racial biases embedded in commercial face recognition systems. The results were shocking: the worst system, IBM’s, was 34.4 percentage points worse at classifying gender for dark-skinned women than light-skinned men. It sparked the debate we’re still having now. It also soon became apparent that the problem was also deeper than skewed training data or imperfect algorithms. And even if the systems reach 100% accuracy, they can still be deployed in dangerous ways. Read the full story. —Karen Hao Facebook just released a database of 100,000 deepfakes to teach AI how to spot them Pre-empting a problem: The tools to make deepfakes—AI-generated images of people appearing to say or do something they didn’t—are now widely available and fairly easy to use. That’s led to worries they will be used to spread dangerous misinformation. For now, they remain pretty easy for humans to spot. Still, social media companies are concerned that deepfakes will soon flood their sites, and they want to make it easier for machines to identify them.   What’s happening: To address the problem, Facebook wants to use AI to help fight back. To train AIs to spot manipulated videos, it is releasing the largest ever data set of deepfakes⁠—more than 100,000 clips produced using 3,426 actors and a range of existing face-swapping techniques. It also announced the winner of its Deepfake Detection Challenge. The best model was able to detect whether a video was a deepfake with 65% accuracy. What’s next: Facebook does not plan to use any of the winning models on its site. For one thing, 65% accuracy is not yet good enough to be useful. Instead, it thinks that deepfake detection may also be improved by using techniques that go beyond the analysis of an image or video itself, such as assessing its context or provenance. Read the full story.  —Will Douglas Heaven We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet 'em at me.)   + Patrick Stewart reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 53.   + A cheeky elephant stealing then returning a wildlife photographer’s hat.   + A pair of newborn hares (called leverets.)   + Cities as Escher-style graphic puzzles.   + An incredible starling murmuration.   + Opera fan? The Royal Opera House in London livestreamed its first performance since lockdown last weekend. You can watch it back here.   + A cat you can see… FROM SPACE.   + Get a bird feeder. It will bring you joy. Sponsor Message Tech Leaders Share Strategies for Future-Proofing Business What does the future of remote work look like? How will industries like sports, education, and retail reinvent themselves with new digital experiences? 100+ business and technology leaders will join HPE Discover Virtual Experience to share their stories and strategies to build for the future. Join the all-digital event at no cost, starting live and on demand on June 23. The top ten must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 The US is seeing another spike in coronavirus cases A number of states including Florida, California, and Texas had record numbers in the past several days. (Reuters)   + The US seems to have given up fighting the virus. (The Atlantic)   + Why you shouldn’t call it a “second wave.” (Medium)   + Contact tracing is the only way to cope with the pandemic until we have a vaccine. (WP $)   + Apps mostly haven’t come to the rescue. (NBC)   + What the US can learn from the Ebola outbreak. (New Yorker $) 2 Beijing has had to lock down again after finding 79 new covid-19 cases The outbreak has been linked to a wholesale food market. (CNN) 3 Most people with coronavirus don’t seem to spread it Just 10-20% of those infected—so-called “superspreaders”—may be behind 80% of transmissions. (Ars Technica)   + The “K” value may prove more important than the “R” rate. (Wired UK) 4 The UK is lifting lockdown too quickly says, the WHO Stores are reopening before there’s a workable contact tracing system in place. (The Guardian)   + Lots of European countries are reopening to visitors today (not American ones, though.) (NYT $) 5 Spies can listen in by looking at a light bulb’s vibrations 💡 Insane. And it isn’t even that expensive to set up. (Wired $) 6 Big Tech is getting even bigger 💸 Awash with cash, they’re snapping up startups and aggressively expanding into new domains. (NYT $)   + Tech companies say they value diversity. Their actions suggest otherwise. (CNBC) 7 Latin American researchers are joining the race for a covid-19 vaccine 💉 They fear breakthroughs from abroad will be too slow, restrictive or expensive to benefit their region. (Nature)   + Even the most promising vaccine candidates will only cover a fraction of the world’s population next year. (Axios)   + There’s no shortage of volunteers for them. (NYT $) 8 How not to do activism on Twitter If you have nothing useful to add, say nothing. (OneZero $)   + It is rarely worth engaging with racists online. (BBC)   + Influencers are walking a tightrope. (WP $) 9 Why a small town in Washington has started printing its own currency  In Tenino’s case, money quite literally does grow on trees. (The Hustle) 10 “Yoga with Adriene” is the sort of relaxing YouTube content we all need 🧘 For me, it’s qigong videos. (The Atlantic) Access, not academics.  Tap into the collective brain power of MIT when you purchase a subscription today.  Quote of the day “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!” —Author Mark O’Connell recalls a particularly apt line from Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” in an article for 1843 Magazine.  Top image credit: MS TECH | GETTY Please send cats you can see from space to hi@technologyreview.com. Follow me on Twitter at @charlottejee. Thanks for reading! —Charlotte Was this newsletter forwarded to you, and you'd like to see more? Sign up for free Don't settle for half the story. 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